The bankrupt bookseller Borders wants to sell its stash of 65,536 IP addresses to healthcare software vendor Cerner for $12 per address.

The bust high street chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February, and has been selling off its assets to pay its creditors ever since. The address sale is one of its last assets to be disposed of.

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You don't need to be a genius to debug a pf.conf firewall ruleset, you just need the guts to run tcpdump

But seriously, 65536 is 2^16 (16 bits). Why 16? Because it's base 2, of course...so it's really 2^(2^4), which is 2^(2^(2^2)). (Ok, so I'm making that part up even if it is mathematically correct).

So why is the number of ports the same number minus one? Truth is, there aren't "more" ip addresses than ports. Ports are zero-based (port 0 is reserved), whereas the count of ip addresses is one-based. They hold the same number of items.